Rejected lover turns grenade-thrower

The police are hunting down a man who threw a grenade at the house of his former live-in partner in Marikina City shortly after midnight Sunday after she refused to get back with him.

Bryan Fernandez, 36, was tagged by his former partner, Pauline Azarcon, as the suspect who threw a grenade outside her house on Kalabasa Street in Barangay (village) Tumana around 12:40 a.m.

The Marikina police chief, Senior Supt. Vincent Calanoga, said Azarcon and her 16-year-old brother were then inside the house when the blast shook their two-story residence, causing slight damage. The siblings were unhurt.

In her statement to the police, Azarcon said her two-year relationship with Fernandez recently came to an end and that she refused his appeals for a reconciliation. The 26-year-old call centre worker later received text messages from him threatening to kill her and her family.

A witness to the explosion said the man who threw the grenade arrived with a companion on a white motorcycle that had no license plate.

Azarcon's younger brother recalled that two weeks earlier, while he was at their front yard with some friends, a man aboard a motorcycle also threw an object at them that fell into the drainage hole. They then thought that it was just a rock.

Upon inspection of Sunday's blast site and the drainage, members of the Eastern Police District's explosive ordnance division recovered a grenade lever and an unexploded MK2 fragmentation grenade.

Calanoga said a manhunt operation against Fernandez was launched after police failed to find him at his residence on Malaya Street in Barangay Malanday.